"Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them." -- Diane Johnson

Diane Johnson (born April 28, 1934) is an American-born novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often contain American heroines living abroad in contemporary France.

Born in Moline, Illinois, Johnson's recent books include Lulu in Marrakech (2008), L'Affaire (2004), Le Mariage (2000), and Le Divorce (1997) for which she was a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the California Book Awards gold medal for fiction.

She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since the mid 1970s. With filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Johnson co-authored the screenplay to The Shining (1980) based on the horror novel of the same name written by Stephen King.

In 2003, a movie version of her comedy of manners novel Le Divorce was released, directed by James Ivory and starring Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts.

Johnson currently divides her time between homes in Paris and San Francisco.

"A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen.""A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.""But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.""Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is."